Maine Places

You Could Live Here

Maine Places

By Sarah Stebbins on Mar 13, 2018

In the first chapter of the novel The Way Life Should Be, Christina Baker Kline describes her protagonist gazing up at a bulletin board in her New York City office:

Tacked to the gray synthetic fabric is a photo, torn from a magazine, of a weathered elfin cottage on the Maine coast. Several times a day my glance strays to this photo; the image has become totemic, as unreal a place as Middle Earth. Just looking at is soothes me, the way sound machines of waves or rain can calm your nerves. I have never been to Maine, but in my imagination life there isn’t so complicated. I picture a lump of dough rising under a tea towel on a kitchen counter; pansies spilling from a window box; seagulls the size of small dogs, circling in slow motion overhead.

I read these lines for the first time a week ago and keep returning to them in my mind. Living in Maine, I know that it’s far from a fantasyland. (As does Baker Kline — she spent part of her childhood here and owns a home in Southwest Harbor.) And yet, when I look at certain remote, old, Maine cottages I too feel a sense of calmness wash over me — as if the sheer beauty of the place, and constancy of faded shingles and slanted floorboards that have sheltered and supported so many hardy souls, can cancel out life’s complexities. Of course, nothing can do that. But I believe some Maine houses can make your troubles feel pretty far away. In this roundup of current real estate offerings, I’ve attempted to harness that sense of otherworldliness and those pansies-spilling-from-a-window-box feels.